As I discovered early on during my time in Core 456, the digital world we live in today was not always established. What has become our everyday norm—living digitally—was not always something we were so effortlessly immersed in, and we have several visionaries from the past to thank for this. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist born in 1955, is known for his contributions to the invention of the internet. Berners-Lee was an engineer for the Plessey company after graduation and eventually worked as a contractor for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), where he proposed the idea of hypertext with his fellow researchers. After leaving CERN and working at John Poole’s Image Computer Systems, he later returned to CERN with a newfound idea of combining hypertext with internet applications. These proposals from Berners-Lee gave birth to the internet, allowing people from all over the world to connect within seconds. Berners-Lee published a website urging and directing others on how to create their own webpages. Without Berners-Lee, who knows when we would have access to the things we have now? Berners-Lee continues to advocate for internet accessibility and the ability for customers to access private organizations that we are now very familiar with, like Google and Microsoft. Berners-Lee is now deemed the “Inventor of the World Wide Web” and has advocated for people like us to have access to the latest information on various issues that directly affect us worldwide. Berners-Lee allowed us to expand our knowledge of current and past economic, social, and political issues around the world.
All of the information discussed in this post can be found here.